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[ShinNL]

It makes things like light, shadows, and reflections look more real. This is it vs the traditional lighting of Metro Exodus.

Yes you can bake lighting but that doesn't work with anything that's movable/dynamic from environment objects to game characters.

This also highlights how effective baked lighting is. It's a form of optimization and trickery. Generally, this is the reason why I'm impressed with crazy Switch ports. They're pulling so many cats out of the bag to make something look like something the hardware isn't able to run, but good luck detecting them all.

Maybe it's because I'm an old school web programmer who started on the web where I had to count kilobytes to make things look good and still work smoothly. Nowadays I cringe at 20MB ads or javascript code that takes 10 seconds to build up the page. Optimization is a form of art.

 

[onQ123]

I gotta be real. This whole talk about ray tracing and the push for it - I’m not seeing the major graphical leap everyone else seems to be seeing. Like fluid simulations and physics interactions - that all looks game-changing impressive to me. Ray tracing? Eh. I honestly didn’t mind whatever tricks they were using before to simulate reflections and lighting - am I missing something or have we just not gotten to a point where the technology is advanced enough to make a huge difference graphically in a normal game?

The key takeaway is that it's going to save develops a lot of time so they don't have to use the tricks.

PS5 & Xbox Series X games built around using ray-tracing can be made faster & cheaper.

 

[Fbh]

I understand way too little of the tech. From what I gather, apparently the whole tech is still in early stages and the big difference should come when it starts being used more widely for global illumination or something.

The way it is now though, mostly focusing on reflection, it just seems like a way to tank performance for neglectable upgrades.

 

[diffusionx]

The key takeaway is that it's going to save develops a lot of time so they don't have to use the tricks.

PS5 & Xbox Series X games built around using ray-tracing can be made faster & cheaper.

Nope, it is going to push devs to do things they do now faster and cheaper, which means that they will be pushed to do more things, better.

Second, PS5 and Xbox Series X, using first-gen AMD RT, are not going to be the place for big time RT innovation IMO. I expect RT usage on those consoles to be relatively minimal. It is going to be on the PC side the next five years.

 

[onQ123]

Nope, it is going to push devs to do things they do now faster and cheaper, which means that they will be pushed to do more things, better.

Second, PS5 and Xbox Series X, using first-gen AMD RT, are not going to be the place for big time RT innovation IMO. I expect RT usage on those consoles to be relatively minimal. It is going to be on the PC side the next five years.

Why would you say "Nope" to

"The key takeaway is that it's going to save develops a lot of time so they don't have to use the tricks.

PS5 & Xbox Series X games built around using ray-tracing can be made faster & cheaper.



Edit: Also PC probably won't get the benefit of the faster production because they still have to make fallback designs for people without RT hardware

 

[TheContact]

ray tracing helps with shadows as well, here's it running in WoW:

RT on =

RT off=

it's pretty hard to notice overall, this is probably the best example of a easily identifiable juxtaposed screenshots. the problem is the amount of computations required to process this is killing the FPS and isn't worth it. The 3x cards will probably handle it a lot better, but WoW is actually a pretty demanding game on your GPU when you're running at max or close to max settings

 

[diffusionx]

Why would you say "Nope" to

"The key takeaway is that it's going to save develops a lot of time so they don't have to use the tricks.

PS5 & Xbox Series X games built around using ray-tracing can be made faster & cheaper.



Edit: Also PC probably won't get the benefit of the faster production because they still have to make fallback designs for people without RT hardware

Because, faster & cheaper just doesn't happen lol. The tech is always improving. RT provides a brand new way to push far beyond what we currently know. People aren't going to say, "let's just do what we do now, except instead of SSR and cube maps we will do ray tracing, and leave it at that." Of course not. Never happened before and will never happen. The time saved from not using those tricks will be pushed to push lighting/reflections/world design/atmosphere farther than is possible now.

PC will benefit hugely from this as the tech gets more mainstream and powerful over the next few years. Like I said before I think PC platform is going to lap consoles over the next few generations of GPUs.

 

[onQ123]

Because, faster & cheaper just doesn't happen lol. The tech is always improving. RT provides a brand new way to push far beyond what we currently know. People aren't going to say, "let's just do what we do now, except instead of SSR and cube maps we will do ray tracing, and leave it at that." Of course not. Never happened before and will never happen. The time saved from not using those tricks will be pushed to push lighting/reflections/world design/atmosphere farther than is possible now.

PC will benefit hugely from this as the tech gets more mainstream and powerful over the next few years. Like I said before I think PC platform is going to lap consoles over the next few generations of GPUs.

SMH that doesn't change the fact that it will make it faster & cheaper to make the games.


Even if they make a game that cost $500,000 to make using Ray-tracing it would still be faster & cheaper than it would have been without it.

 

[Hunnybun]

It's not about looking better, it's about making things easier to produce. same thing with UE5 getting rid of polygon budget restrictions.

How does UE5 actually do that? I don't really get it. What's the crucial breakthrough that lets them use these micro polygons without crippling performance?

 

[VincentMatts]

I gotta be real. This whole talk about ray tracing and the push for it - I’m not seeing the major graphical leap everyone else seems to be seeing. Like fluid simulations and physics interactions - that all looks game-changing impressive to me. Ray tracing? Eh. I honestly didn’t mind whatever tricks they were using before to simulate reflections and lighting - am I missing something or have we just not gotten to a point where the technology is advanced enough to make a huge difference graphically in a normal game?

The thing is, Ray tracing can also simulate light in real time. Like a sun, and the shadows that the sun creates near walls etc would also automatically generate on the map.

This means that developers would spend a lot less time creating a fake sun, fake shadows, lights all manually.

Ray tracing isnt just about the reflections on shit. Its simplifies the development process as well.

 

[Hudo]

I gotta be real. This whole talk about ray tracing and the push for it - I’m not seeing the major graphical leap everyone else seems to be seeing. Like fluid simulations and physics interactions - that all looks game-changing impressive to me. Ray tracing? Eh. I honestly didn’t mind whatever tricks they were using before to simulate reflections and lighting - am I missing something or have we just not gotten to a point where the technology is advanced enough to make a huge difference graphically in a normal game?

Well, it depends on the application. Generally, ray tracing simulates (still approximately) the rendering equation, which is by itself not computable. Path tracing would be the next step after ray tracing, where you have for each ray a Monte Carlo method for secondary rays etc. (which is closer to how light behaves, especially when hitting diffuse material etc.). So I can get why some people say it's hard to see. But it helps in rendering accurate lighting, reflections and refractions, accurate ambient lighting etc.
With rasterization, we're basically stacking a lot of bullshit to fool people into thinking what they are seeing is real and physically correct (it isn't). And that makes it hard to reason (and debug) your renderer. And then you have multiple render passes with different rasterization techniques like deferred rendering as first pass (to help render many objects faster) and a second pass with your standard forward rendering for all transparent objects (because deferred rendering builds your framebuffer differently without depth info, which you need for transparent objects). And other passes as well for other stuff...

The big thing (for me) is from an implementation point of view: It's far easier to reason about a ray tracer than to reason about the whole pipeline for rasterization. It's also kinda the canonical way of how one would naively think about rendering stuff because it's close to our light model(s) in physics (except for the big difference that the viewpoint shoots the rays and not not light sources, I guess). I just find the theory of how ray tracing works much more elegant.

 

[nemiroff]

Waste of resources. I’d rather see huge graphical leaps like mgs1 to mgs2 and silent Hill 1 to 2 than reflections.

Reflections is just one part of the wholistic picture of RT. RT simulates how light actually works, with none of the "fakery" and depressing limits we're "used to". RT has been an unobtainable holy grail for decades, but now we're basically here. You can even use RT for sound btw.

 

[VincentMatts]

Reflections is just one part of the wholistic picture of RT. RT simulates how light actually works, with no fakery as we've been used to. Thus has been an unobtainable holy grail for decades. You can even use RT for sound.

IDK but I think I spot a difference..

Literally makes an ugly game like minecraft look amazing.

 

[Romulus]

I think the problem with RT is that some developers do a decent job of simulating light bounce and reflection without it. So, when you do see accurate RT, reflections etc, the difference is noticeable but not as drastic as it could have been.

 

[nemiroff]

I think the problem with RT is that some developers do a decent job of simulating light bounce and reflection without it. So, when you do see accurate RT, reflections etc, the difference is noticeable but not as drastic as it could have been.

That's a good point.

Either way there's no way back now. It doesn't matter if someone "doesn't get it", RT is here to stay, and that is for the most part only a good thing.

 

[Phrixotrichus]

I think the problem with RT is that some developers do a decent job of simulating light bounce and reflection without it. So, when you do see accurate RT, reflections etc, the difference is noticeable but not as drastic as it could have been.

Agreed. Developers like Naughty Dog have become incredibly good at faking these things.. But, still, once you see the errors you can`t "unsee" them, and the amount of detail work that goes into creating somewhat believable fakes is absolutely inhuman.
Nvidia`s "it just works" is absolutely true....if you have the enormous performance reserves necessary to make it "just work".
If we get to that point developers will suddenly have a lot more time for other things besides fickling with lighting-maps and fake light sources....

 

[Kaleinc]

Literally makes an ugly game like minecraft look amazing.

Looks like 20 year old hl2.
You won't be seeing much of a difference from rt for at least 3 generations at best. There is no other way to advance visuals, that's it.
Well anyway unlike all kinds ambient occlusion which only make scene look worse rt is not useless.

developers will suddenly have a lot more time for

minesweeper and you get same copy pasted fifa as the year before and the one before that.

 

[JimboJones]

Imagine a game looking like the last of us 2 but everything in the environment is also dynamic and can be interacted with.

Baked lighting is like pre rendered graphics of old, it's like people saying well Resident Evil remake looks so good why bother with realtime 3D environments?

 

[supernova8]

When ray tracing eventually becomes the standard (ie when it's just there rather than being something you toggle on/off) we'll appreciate it. If game creators can redirect the time they used to spend on faking the light to do other things maybe we'll much better looking games within the same/less development timeframe/budget.

As it stands right now, I agree with OP it's a very marginal improvement and I probably wouldn't enable it unless I could guarantee a locked 60fps with it enabled.

 

[JCK75]

As a blender user a good example would be their Cycles engine (raytracing) vs their new real time Engine Evee.
Results are incredible for Evee but there is a pretty huge difference in realism when using Cycles.

 

[Saberus]

Other than making the games look more “realistic” it doesn’t do anything else.

Helps developers complete their games faster, don't have to mess around with light maps.. shadow maps..etc..

 

[alabtrosMyster]

This is raytracing

SOLVED!

 

[Danjin44]

Helps developers complete their games faster, don't have to mess around with light maps.. shadow maps..etc..

But it also effects the performance, few years back how many here begging to have 60FPS as standard? Personally I'm much more excited for seeing less load times, thats the one that will actually effect the gameplay fellow and effect how developers will design their levels.

To me that sounds way more exciting than Racy Tracing.

 

[Strider311]

I gotta be real. This whole talk about ray tracing and the push for it - I’m not seeing the major graphical leap everyone else seems to be seeing. Like fluid simulations and physics interactions - that all looks game-changing impressive to me. Ray tracing? Eh. I honestly didn’t mind whatever tricks they were using before to simulate reflections and lighting - am I missing something or have we just not gotten to a point where the technology is advanced enough to make a huge difference graphically in a normal game?

Dude, I’m with you. As someone who, for the hell of it, has two RTX 2080s sli, I have done my own comparisons with it off and on. And I honestly can barely tell a difference. I think those resources would be better spent elsewhere, because “faking” the lighting and reflections is good enough for me.

 

[lukilladog]

It makes things like light, shadows, and reflections look more real. This is it vs the traditional lighting of Metro Exodus.

Yes you can bake lighting but that doesn't work with anything that's movable/dynamic from environment objects to game characters.

There are other traditional techniques that can do something similar, they are not used because the game had to run on 750ti equivalent consoles (1/4th of the rtx 2060), so it´s not a fair comparison.

 

[jadefire66]

It's a thing for the future. Right now it costs too much, both in framerate and in the price of an RTX card (they're all expensive af).

 

[lukilladog]

Waste of time, AI will raster shade scenes faster and make them look ray traced I think.

 

[Phrixotrichus]

Waste of time, AI will raster shade scenes faster and make them look ray traced I think.

That is not how rendering and AI "fill-in" works.....

 

[SF Kosmo]

Yes! This is what I’m talking about - the physical behavior of water. I see basically no games that have improved it that drastically since like Xbox 360 days and I am still confused as to why that is.

I don't know that that's true, games like Horizon Forbidden West are showing more advanced water caustics with cresting and the like. Stuff like Sea of Thieves is also quite advanced.

 

[SF Kosmo]

I think the problem with RT is that some developers do a decent job of simulating light bounce and reflection without it. So, when you do see accurate RT, reflections etc, the difference is noticeable but not as drastic as it could have been.

This is definitely true, but there are also limitations to that fakery, a lot of times it only works on static objects and not a highly dynamic scene. One of the reasons why Minecraft is such a cool use case because the user is constantly changing the environment so it would be imposible or very difficult to do those kinds of effects any other way.

And there are some things that no one has really figured out how to fake very well. Reflections are a big one that you can really only fake nicely is specific situations and everything else looks like hot garbage.

 

[Mister Wolf]

I think the problem with RT is that some developers do a decent job of simulating light bounce and reflection without it. So, when you do see accurate RT, reflections etc, the difference is noticeable but not as drastic as it could have been.

Regardless of how well the baked lighting looks it does not interact with and properly light dynamic objects. That goes for The Last Of Us 2, RDR2, and any other game that uses it.

 

[Romulus]

Regardless of how well the baked lighting looks it does not interact with and properly light dynamic objects.

Of course not, it's fake. But like other techniques, fakery can improve too.

I just don't see the cost value in it. I would rather an improved, inexpensive fake solution versus real RT.

 

[Elektro Demon]

It's nothing special. Shiny puddles of water and metallic surfaces.
I'd be more interested in advanced physics or AI then ray tracing.

 

[Mister Wolf]

Of course not, it's fake. But like other techniques, fakery can improve too.

I just don't see the cost value in it. I would rather an improved, inexpensive fake solution versus real RT.

Baked lighting cant improve. Its inherent flaw is it only works on objects that cant move.

 

[Romulus]

Baked lighting cant improve. Its inherent flaw is it only works on objects that cant move.

Not only baked lighting specifically, just another technique, or combinations of techniques that gets closer to RT.

 

[llien]

It's like HDR. At first you will be like...yeah sure it looks different but idk if it's better.

Uh, doh, whah?
I was stunned by HDR the moment I saw it. (OLED)

No wow effect with RT, as we've had reflections and shades and light effects for a while.

Read my post above, for good environment artists it will save them a lot of time.

RT perf to warrant the careless low development effort seems doesn't seem to be there and that won't change any time soon.

Baked lighting cant improve.

Epic says hi:

 

[Mister Wolf]

Uh, doh, whah?
I was stunned by HDR the moment I saw it. (OLED)

No wow effect with RT, as we've had reflections and shades and light effects for a while.



RT perf to warrant the careless low development effort seems doesn't seem to be there and that won't change any time soon.


Epic says hi:

That isn't baked lighting. Nice attempt at a "gotcha" though. Do better research next time.

 

[Falc67]

With the New 3090, would that be able to fully path trace a game like RDR2 for example? 1080p?

 

[llien]

That isn't baked lighting. Nice attempt at a "gotcha" though. Do better research next time.

Research of what? In the context of this thread, it's RT vs anything, but RT.

 

[nkarafo]

Optimization is a form of art.

Unfortunately everyone now just brute forces shitty code because the hardware allows them to do it.

 

[Mister Wolf]

Research of what? In the context of this thread, it's RT vs anything, but RT.

Says who? You came up with your own rule. I know exactly what I said.

 

[Nehezir]

it's a new rendering process or somethign and they basically used it as a expensive excuse to hike the price of GPU's going forward while also making their product line extremely convoluted, is my current assessment of ray-tracing.

I'm far more bothered about them releasing supers out of freaking nowhere RIGHT after the launch of the vanilla RTX 2000 cards. Really stuck a pipe in my backdoor.

 

[llien]

You came up with your own rule.

I might have mistaken this thread for some other thread.

Oh wait, I haven't, it's about "I don't see what RT brings".
Did you manage to derail it?

 

[Mister Wolf]

I might have mistaken this thread for some other thread.

Oh wait, I haven't, it's about "I don't see what RT brings".
Did you manage to derail it?

If you don't see what raytracing in regards to lighting brings then you wouldn't see what Voxel GI brings as it is just a simpler form of the tracing that triangle raytracing is doing.

 

[Nikana]

Uh, doh, whah?
I was stunned by HDR the moment I saw it. (OLED)

No wow effect with RT, as we've had reflections and shades and light effects for a while.

I would say that HDR for many, there are threads about it in this forum even, are not sold on HDR by any means and don't see the difference. Ray Tracing like HDR is an improvement over what we already have like HDR.

Perhaps the difference just isn't enough of a difference to "wow" you like HDR but for many Ray Tracing is a "wow" factor. I played Control on Bone X first and really enjoyed it but recently played through on PC with HDR and High Ray Tracing and there are moments in that game the Ray Tracing is very much a "wow" for me.

But like with HDR, its not always used to the most efficient way at all times, yet. Like HDR it requires the developer to know how to use it properly and it will take some time developers to use it to its total efficiency.

The Minecraft demos to me are the biggest showpiece to just what the tech can do. Extrapolate that to games that use modern visuals and I think you can see the possibilities. I am personally hoping Doom Eternal gets a good Ray Tracing patch. That is a showpiece for HDR and I would love to see what that team can do with RTX.

 

[llien]

I would say that HDR for many, there are threads about it in this forum even, are not sold on HDR

This has always puzzled me.
I guess the issue is with lots of "HDR" TVs not being HDR (in the sense of the output).
I simply refuse to believe you could NOT notice the dramatic change.

 

[Whitecrow]

RT does not mean more geometry, or higher image quality, or higher color gamut.

Is a technique aimed at photorealism and immersion.

There might be people who dont give a fuck, but also a lot of people who actually do.

Theres people who look after feeling like they are inside the game by having a beliavable enviroment. Ray Tracing is for us.

If you dont care about it, there are a lot of options for you...

 

[Nikana]

This has always puzzled me.
I guess the issue is with lots of "HDR" TVs not being HDR (in the sense of the output).
I simply refuse to believe you could NOT notice the dramatic change.

It really depends on what you are looking for and how its sold to you. Some people are expecting the picture quality itself to drastically change. If you are used to looking an oversaturated image on a good LED TV, then HDR could actually look worse at first glance. It really depends on content too.

 

[Kerlurk]

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[MiguelItUp]

Yeah, I can see that. I personally think it's all about how it's implemented and used. In some instances it doesn't seem like it does much at all. But when it's done right, and done well, it's definitely a bit noticeable and can help the overall experience a bit IMO.